Kiwi credit check firm Veda moves into Dubai

Auckland-based credit check bureau Veda is chasing opportunities in the Gulf states, with the announcement of a joint venture in Dubai with Saudi Arabian business partners.

Established for more than two decades in New Zealand and Australia, Veda has been taking its proprietary software-based credit reporting and analysis systems into Southeast Asia, operating in Singapore and Malaysia since 2002, while its Saudi operation has been going since 2003.

A new operation, Cambodia, opened just months ago.

Veda managing director John Roberts says the firm will be chasing new business throughout the Greater Arab Free Trade Area (Gafta).

The move follows Veda's growing involvement with World Bank efforts to bring credit reporting standards to emerging markets, following a new focus on the area after the global financial crisis.

"Post-GFC, the World Bank has been working with central banks in those countries to look at how they can bring into play proper compliance and risk assessment tools so that foreign lenders will become active in those markets," said Roberts, who attributes part of Veda's success to this country's lack of a unique personal identifier system.

"That required development of sophisticated algorithms to match personal information accurately," he said.

Also working for Veda was the high reliability of its systems, which he said had never required disaster recovery in two decades of operation, and the company's ability to build systems customised to local regulatory requirements that could operate bilingually for non-English-speaking markets.

"We believe what's winning this business is the incredible stability of the platform, and we've cracked that matching algorithm technology," Roberts said.

The firm holds credit records on 70 million individuals and nine million businesses, and has more than 30,000 customers globally.

The firm has two other requests for proposals in the pipeline in the Middle East and Southeast Asia at present.